A Heart to Heart with a Five Year Old: On Death
The play of firetruck lights coming through the curtains was more intriguing than her bedtime story so despite my attempts to keep her laying down, she, like the rest of the neighborhood, made her way to the window. My daughters paws reached up to stick themselves on the glass that her breath had fogged up. She was reaching out, with no where to reach as she saw the EMT reach in to pull out a gurney.
I told all of my children near the windows that the only thing left to see here was a dead body, and to let it lay by lying down. They'd watched with the rest of the neighbors as silent firetrucks pulled up, followed about fifteen minutes later by a silent ambulance, which meant one thing.
Reluctantly, she finally laid down for her story but paused me about two sentences in.
"Um, excuse me Mama, sometimes my heart beats really fast when I'm scared and right now my heart is beating really fast."
"You're scared?" I asked.
"uh, huh..." she pulled the covers up to her eyes shyly.
"Because our neighbor died?"
"Uh, huh..."
Laying beside her now, I reached out and held the hand that she was using to monitor her heart and said, "You know, I get scared too. When I was a little girl I was so scared all the time that the people I love will die. Most of them are still alive and if we're anything like my two grandmothers, we may get to be old-ish ladies together. That's my wish anyway."
"Mine too," her eyes lit up, opening wide, before she dropped in body with the sentence, "yeah, but anybody can die."
I went on in tears that she's right, and that even though when people die they go back to God, that I want us both to live forever because the amount that we would miss each other would be more heartache than I think either of us can bear, but that when it does happen...
She interrupted, "well, then I will see you when we are both there, in heaven. Which is when I will meet your grandmother. But I will miss you until then."
We stayed quiet, hands over her heart for a moment. When I could muster up words without bursting my about-to-sob seam, I said, "Feel this? As long as your heart is beating, I'm in here with you." With my other hand, I cupped my heart and said, "And as long as my heart beats, you are in here, with me."
We touched foreheads and stayed awhile in the bittersweet sacredness of what it means to be alive, when you know your neighbors spouse is going to bed on a stormy night, alone for the first time in five decades because in an instant, their ability to experience love in aliveness like this, was gone. And, there's nothing anybody can do about it. Not even the little arms reaching out in hopes of changing something unchangeable, from a magical distance.
It was one of those hard, uncertain conversations that my thirty seven year old self faced equally as newly and unknowingly as my five year old. Those ones that go..."even as your creator, I am not the Creator," and the only thing I can do is be here with that which I created and love it endlessly while time proves to end. The ones that prove our children, know exactly as much if not more about life then we do (where it counts).
We went to bed, hands over heart, as scared and unsure as ever, together, one precious, ever-grateful beat at a time.